Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - URBAN GreenUP (New Strategy for Re-Naturing Cities through Nature-Based Solutions)

Teaser

Over the course of the past decades, many severe environmental problems have arisen due to sprawling urbanisation and climate change. Poor air quality, floods, drought, heat waves and heat island effect are just some examples. As a consequence, health and societal emergencies...

Summary

Over the course of the past decades, many severe environmental problems have arisen due to sprawling urbanisation and climate change. Poor air quality, floods, drought, heat waves and heat island effect are just some examples. As a consequence, health and societal emergencies have emerged, calling for new radical actions on a global scale. One of these actions is URBAN GreenUP, an EU-funded project aiming to make our cities more sustainable and resilient to climate change by means of the very essence of our own environment: nature.

URBAN GreenUP’s approach is based on the revolutionary concept of Renaturing Urban Planning (RUP). The goal is to develop a methodology integrating city planning and nature. This will be achieved through the design and implementation of Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) in urban areas.

The project will demonstrate and validate its methodology in the Front-runner cities of Liverpool (the UK), Valladolid (Spain) and Izmir (Turkey). The three cities are implementing more than hundred different kinds of NBS. Some of these are re-naturing urbanization actions, such as the creation of green cycle lanes, plantation of shade and cooling street trees, all of them contributing to urban carbon sinks. Other interventions will improve the cities’ water management. Examples are sustainable drainage systems, floodable parks, riverbanks restoration and conversion of grey and black surfaces into green ones. A large number of NBS consist of singular green infrastructures, such as noise barriers, green façades and roofs, mobile and floating gardens, garden bio-filters, large urban trees and hedging acting as filters for urban air pollutants. Finally, cities will carry out also non-technical, social interventions such as educational, awareness-raising and engaging activities for citizens. The ultimate goal is to involve citizens in the design and local implementation of NBS.

But large-scale impacts only happen when efforts are global. This is why URBAN GreenUP will deliver a replicable and scalable renaturing methodology. The five Follower cities of Mantova (Italy), Ludwigsburg (Germany), Chengdu (China), QuyNhon (Vietnam) and Medellin (Colombia) will make this possible by tuning their own RUP on the experience gathered by Front-runners. But URBAN GreenUP is going even beyond that and work is underway to create a worldwide network of cities interested in adopting the project’s RUP strategy.

The replicability of URBAN GreenUP’s approach will also boost the creation of a procedure for wide NBS Exploitation and Market deployment, hence leading to an NBS, EU-driven global market. To this aim, the project is working on the definition of NBS business models and financial formulas, which will contribute to the NBS market creation.

Work performed

\"URBAN GreenUP has carried out a number of complementary yet interconnected key activities. These can be grouped as follows:

• Development of the Re-naturing methodology. As a starting point for the development of URBAN GreenUP’s approach, the project has released three keynote documents: i) an NBS Catalogue, presenting the disparate technical interventions being implemented by Frontrunner cities; ii) a Climate Change Challenges Catalogue, helping cities examine in a simple way such challenges and their impacts; iii) Barriers and Boundaries Identification, an analysis of the main technical, political, legislative, financial and social aspects potentially preventing the implementation of NBS. The three documents are publicly available on the project’s website and will support the global uptake of URBAN GreenUP’s methodology.
• NBS implementation. Front-runner cities and partners have worked on the definition of the locations where NBS will be demonstrated, as well as on the technical and economical aspects of the interventions. The work on these technical and economic projects has been concluded for approximately 70% of the NBS. The tendering process will start soon after the delivery of the projects. At the same time, the consortium has: i) established the baseline for the status of the city areas where NBS will be implemented; and ii) defined the monitoring strategy for the assessment of the NBS impacts (to be carried out in the second part of the project).
• Replication. URBAN GreenUP has defined a methodology to help Follower cities implement local, long-term RUPs based on lesson learned by Front-runner Cities.
• Exploitation. A strategy for the evaluation of NBS social and economic impacts has been developed. This strategy also aims at providing robust evidence of the interventions cost-effectiveness. A first draft presenting possible exploitable results has also been created. This will be used to launch the design of innovative financial mechanisms and business models fostering the NBS implementation.
• Communication and Dissemination (C&D). A C&D plan has been delivered at the beginning of the project. It outlines URBAN GreenUP’s impact-driven, integrated strategy for large awareness, acceptance and uptake of the project’s results, to be followed over the course of the project. This includes the definition of the URBAN GreenUP’s target audiences, C&D channels and social media strategy. Work has also been done to define the project’s visual identity. Finally, an editorial plan has been developed to coordinate the production and distribution of journalistic content.

Finally, one major accomplishment was the launch of the NBS Cooperation Manifesto (#NBSMANIFESTO) on November 2018. The Manifesto is an initiative of URBAN GreenUP endorsed by the European Commission and by most of the EU-funded NBS projects. It states the commitment of the signatories to support the worldwide diffusion of NBS and RUPs. The ceremony of the presentation and official signature took place during the First World Forum on Urban Forests, hosted by the Follower city of Mantova from the 28th of November to the 1st of December 2018. The collection of signatures is open to whoever is interested. The Manifesto is available for online signature in the project website.\"

Final results

URBAN GreenUP’s main outcome will be a methodology to cope with climate change and other societal challenges via NBS implementation in urban areas. Breakthroughs can be summarised as follows.

• Integration and systematization of re-naturing actions in urban planning. This will help consider direct, indirect and induced effects of NBS and how these interact with each other.
• Implementation of a wide set of innovative NBS. Examples are: wetlands in urban parks for the collection of water for green areas irrigation; biofilters for polluted air; electrowetlands adapted to urban environments; low-cost and low-maintenance green-wall technology; flooding mitigation measures; smart soils; use of green spaces connectivity integrating disparate NBS.
• Measurement of benefits. URBAN GreenUP will define new NBS Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to assess the positive impacts of the interventions, as well as their interaction with KPIs available in the literature.
• Market creation. URBAN GreenUP’s methodology will ease business and market creation around NBS. The project will enable the assessment of the NBS-generated monetary value and the identification of exploitable results from demo sites. It will also pursue creation of business models, design of ad-hoc financing mechanisms and assessment of the model replicability.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.urbangreenup.eu/.